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Maben's Beach (Vancouver Island, Canada) with a forest of sea palms (Postelsia palmaeformis)
- © Dominique G. Maucieri

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I'm smiling before a Reef Life Survey dive
in Bamfield (Canada) a- © Valesca de Groot

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Making sure my kit is set up (Bamfield, Canada) - © Valesca de Groot

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Looking through the intertidal seaweeds to see what we can find on Sepings Island, Barclay Sound.

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Just another day out on the water.

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Release day with the Campbell River aquarium. This little blood star is ready to go home.

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This Bull Kelp is taller than me.

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Leather stars (Dermasterias imbricata) during my physiology experiments performing a righting response.

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For my PhD I worked in the Bates Lab at the University of Victoria, examining how heat, hunger and habitat loss affect marine invertebrate communities. My research integrated fieldwork, experiments, and the analysis of large-scale ecological datasets to understand how climate change and anthropogenic disturbance are reshaping marine invertebrate communities. I focused on how habitat loss and food limitation interact with rising temperatures to influence organismal energetics, physiology, and ultimately ecosystem functioning. These questions are central to predicting biodiversity shifts and informing conservation strategies in our changing oceans.

My first chapter is published in Diversity and Distributions (here) and examines the effect of temperature and habitat loss across both space and time on marine invertebrate communities using a long-term data set from the Channel Islands in Southern California.

My second chapter uses Reef Life Survey Data to examine the effect of fish consumption on changes in marine invertebrate abundance during a major marine heatwave in Australia. This analysis showed how temperature dependent consumption by fish is an important driver for invertebrate abundance. Stay tuned for this manusctipt.

My third chapter involved a collaboration with the Hakai's Marna Lab Team on Quadra Island. I performed a set of experiments using Dermasterias imbricata aka Leather sea stars, to examine if access to food is able to mitigate the negative effects of thermal stress. These experiments have finished an I am in the final stages of writing this manuscript. Stay tuned for this manuscript.